Concern Blogs

Jamaldin aged 77, from the village of Sodhari Masjid, outside Hyderabad, in Sindh Province, Pakistan. Photo: Concern Worldwide

By Joan Bolger, Communications Officer, US

Jamaldin aged 77, and a grandfather with nine children of his own, now lives in a house with 17 of his extended family. His home is located in the small village of Sodhari Masjid, a two-hour drive from the town of Hyderabad, in Sindh Province, Pakistan. Jamaldin has two acres of land to call his own and he cultivates it with his family to support the household. They are among the lucky ones.

The majority of families in the village work as share croppers. They keep holdings of up to four acres for various different landlords that take one-third of the profit of all harvests. When asked if this is the norm, Pervez Iqbal, an agriculturalist working with Root Work Foundation (RWF), a close partner of Concern’s in Sindh says, “Not all five fingers are the same,” meaning that there are some land owners that treat their laborers well. Read the rest of this entry »

By Joan Bolger, Communications Officer, Concern Worldwide US

3-year-old Zahida with son Sanam at the Concern-run Oral Therapeutic Care center in Rahuja Village, Sindh Province. Photo: Pakistan, Concern Worldwide

13-year-old Zahida tells me she cried through the night when her father came back from an evening of gambling and told her he had found a suitor for her in marriage. “I was used as the payment. He insisted because he had no other money to give,” she explained, clutching her 12-month-old son Sanam at a Concern-run center established to treat malnourished children in Rahuja village, in Sindh, Pakistan’s southern province.

Zahida walked for one hour to get to the center so that Sanam could be treated. Here, staff record weight and arm circumferences to determine the severity of child malnutrition. The rates in Sindh province are 18.8 percent, well above the World Health Organization’s emergency threshold of 15 percent. In the worst affected areas in the province, Concern nutritionists tell me that malnutrition rates are as high as 50 percent.

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Women farmers cut animal fodder for domestic livestock in Basti Machi village. Photo: Pakistan, Concern Worldwide

By Joan Bolger, Communications Officer, US

Standing on the 6-foot-high embankment that encircles the village of Basti Machi in Punjab Province a three-hour drive from the city of Multan, it’s hard to imagine the destruction wrought by the Indus located not 200 meters from here. Just one year ago, super monsoon rains completely submerged large swathes of this province in six feet of water flattening crops, destroying houses and wiping out livelihoods. For the poorest, the effect was catastrophic.

Nastabebe a 25-year-old mother of one and the appointed leader of this proud village recalls the devastation in quiet, hurried tones. “We rushed, men and women together to build the walls higher around our village after we were warned the waters were coming. With our hands we packed mud to make the walls bigger and wider. We worked day and night, but we could not beat the speed of the river. Everything was lost.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Thomas Fergusson, Water Engineer for Concern in Haiti

Boy is bathed at a Concern-supported stabilization center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, just before leaving for home. Photo: Megan Christensen, Concern Worldwide

The observance of World Water Day this year (March 22), with its spotlight on urban emergencies, comes at a time when many humanitarian aid and relief organizations are contemplating—in some cases, studying in-depth—the growing trend of large emergencies shifting from rural to urban settings.

Increasingly erratic weather patterns, which some link to man-made climate change, are causing droughts and floods that are driving millions to leave the countryside for cities.

In Haiti, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, Concern Worldwide had to tackle most of these issues in highly challenging circumstances, with Port-au-Prince qualifying as a highly impoverished urban setting experiencing a major emergency albeit in extraordinary circumstances. The city was one of the most challenging environments for water and sanitation before the earthquake; the massive disaster only made the situation exponentially more complicated. Read the rest of this entry »

Parents of children attending the Duguna Deddo Primary School at work on a new library that more than 2,000 children will access to borrow books. Photo: Ethiopia, Concern Worldwide

By Joan Bolger, Communications Officer, Concern US

Though she lives just a short walk from the local school, Maza Matthews, 14, rises before dawn every morning to help take care of her younger siblings so that she can be at her school desk for 8:00 am.  Like all pupils in this remote rural village of Duguna Fango, in Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR), Maza’s parents have determined with the school which shift suits their family best.

Double-shift schooling was adopted in Ethiopia as a solution to the overcrowding that ensued after 2002 when the government introduced free primary education for all. In practice it serves many purposes by reducing large class numbers, doubling the number of seats available in a day; and allowing schools to operate on lower budgets. Read the rest of this entry »

By Joan Bolger, Communications Officer, Concern US

Abebech Tito, a mother of children attending the Concern-supported Alternative Basic Education center in Wolayita, Ethiopia. Photo: Ethiopia, Concern Worldwide

There’s a saying in southwestern Ethiopia and not surprisingly—in an area ravaged by drought for three months of the year—it relates to water. Loosely translated it goes: it’s impossible to win back the water after your bucket has fallen over.

Abebech Tito, a mother of five, told me this through the school fence near her children’s classroom as she considered how her life might have been different had she not dropped out of school at Grade 8. She delivered the proverb with a smile and a shrug. “It was my own foolishness,” she added.

Her village of Fango Bijo is located in the Rift Valley in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNPR) region of Ethiopia, where recurrent drought and the prevalence of malaria is notoriously high. “A child died of malaria last year here,” she says, tipping her head towards the Concern-supported Alternative Basic Education (ABE) center that her children now attend. Read the rest of this entry »

Eager to begin classes, trained facilitators have begun classes under the shade of this tree while the ABE center is being built. Photo: Ethiopia, Concern Worldwide

By Joan Bolger, Communications Officer, New York

Schools come in many forms in Ethiopia. The best ones are usually built with brick walls, lined with mud floors, furnished with desks and chairs and served by trained teachers.

In parts of rural Ethiopia however, where villagers are often cut off from roads or where searing heat in the dry season makes traversing long distances by foot impossible, there are several thousands of schools up and running against all the odds.

I  visited one last month in the tiny village of Adacha Ellio, in Ethiopia’s Wolayita region.  Children here have to walk barefoot for up to 8 kilometers a day through dried river beds, steep ravines and dusty, hot terrain to sit on the ground and listen to their teacher under the shade of a tree. There are no desks, no chairs, no blackboard and no books but there are students, 40 of them at a time, who come here eager to learn.

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